XP Pro and svchost.exe high CPU utilization lately.

Has anyone else had this happen to them yet? On all of my laptops I am now seeing a serious CPU utilization problem with svchost.exe like clockwork each time I power on the machine or resume from hibernate.

svchost.exe will sit there at 95% CPU utilization for a good maybe 5 minutes and then the machine is back to normal. Looking at that PID of svchost.exe in process explorer shows that it is a ntdll.dll heap allocation causing the CPU usage. I have the full string at home, can post that later.

I wish I could say how long this has been going on, maybe a couple weeks?

I have noticed this issue with my IBM laptop and every customer I have with an IBM laptop.

Note: Not blaming IBM laptops.

I have narrowed down the issue to windows automatic updates. I don't know how MS has changed the update software or plugin, but whenever it automatically looks for new updates or I manually go to the windows update. SVCHOST process always runs at a 100% cpu usage.

Because of this usage it takes an extremely long time to find, download and install the updates. It does install them though.

The only solution I have is to switch off completely the automatic updates service and only check the windows update website once every week.

Try that and see if your issue is the same. Please post that string though. BTW how did you get that string, is it start->run>cmd, then tasklist /svc

Open it up, doubleclick on the offending svchost.exe and go to the 'Threads' tab. On your first time it'll throw up a warning about not having the debugging tools, but thats ok. Sort by CPU and you'll see which DLL is sucking up all the processor time.

...unfortunately it seems that this is a rather mundane and routinely called string. I can tell you though that hte svchost that contains this is definitely the one with the windows update client running inside of it.

If it's anything like mine, it's due to Windows Updates, at least according to ProcessExplorer (confirmed by turning off autoupdates).Mine started a month or so ago. sfc /scannow finds nothing wrong. I suspect a recent winupdate, but am not concerned enough to troubleshoot further.

I did it with automatic updates on this machine disabled and it seemed to do nothing. I then enabled automatic updates (for every friday at 3am) and it immediately started the high CPU usage again. I noticed that the Context Switches of ntdll.dll were climbing at a rate of about 75 per second and was at about 45k before I killed ntdll.dll.

Once things stabalized I ran /detectnow again and everything seems to be fine. Man.. this is really annoying!

Whats worse is that as of 2 patch cycles ago we started having servers hang on reboot after WSUS pushes an update to them. The box sits there at "Windows is shutting down", but never does. The machine is 100% operational, but the console is inaccessible. Remote Desktop does't work and when you connect via KVM all you can do is see that message about shutting down.

It requires you to physically power down the server and restart it. If you go to Windows Update via IE there is no problem and it restarts perfectly fine.

Originally posted by scorp508:Whats worse is that as of 2 patch cycles ago we started having servers hang on reboot after WSUS pushes an update to them. The box sits there at "Windows is shutting down", but never does. The machine is 100% operational, but the console is inaccessible. Remote Desktop does't work and when you connect via KVM all you can do is see that message about shutting down.

It requires you to physically power down the server and restart it. If you go to Windows Update via IE there is no problem and it restarts perfectly fine.

I've let this problem go thinking it's just my old HP machine and I didn't want the mysterious svchost problem. I've noticed on the WMI reports that many comptuers on the office (1Ghz-2ghz) are having their svchost.exe sit at 90-100% for 1-3 minutes. They are set to auto download and bug for install. If I try and kill it I lose my onboard NIC and sound and have to restart so every time it checks I have to wait for it complete.

Thankfully most of my users don't keep their taskmanger open like I do so they just mention every now and again that it can get slow.

Hate to dig this up on my first post, however I've encountered the same issue after installing and updating a beta of Office 2007. I've since uninstalled it, but that hasn't solved the problem with the high CPU usage instance of svchost.exe and consequentially when it's ended the loss of sound and networking abilities forcing a restart.

Had anyone used Microsoft Update instead of Windows Update? I'm running a relatively new install of XP and can confirm that this was brought on by the installation of 2007 or the visit to Microsoft Update as the installation showed no signs of it before the install process. I'd of course been to Windows Update before; no visits of which caused this issue.

I've temporarily remedied it by the solutions suggested above, but some what comically I'll likely have to visit the source of the problem to see if Microsoft fixes it.

Also for curiosities sake, what networking and sound components are all the affected running? I'm on AC'97 Audio and an RTL8139/810x integrated network (a Gigabyte GA-7VT600-1394).

Is there a win2k version of that hotfix? The XP version refuses to install under win2k.

Stopping the Automatic Update service and/or turning it off in the control panel fixes this, but as I'm setting up this laptop for someone else, I definitely want to leave auto updates on.

It's annoying because on every bootup, it svchost.exe and reg.exe combine to take 100% CPU for about 6 minutes. If I try to reboot or shutdown before this finishes, reg.exe will not terminate, and I have to kill it.

I installed some office sp2 updates the other day and ever since svchost has gone crazy.I installed WinXP_290365_ENU_i386_zip.exeTried to delete software distribution but no luckWent into safe mode and deleted it.Rebooted but windows crashedRebooted again and it worked. Svchost only used about 5-40% and didn't climb over 30MB ram.Rebooted again and it's now now at 0%. No problems now

Any update on this? I have run into this at work and it is affecting most of the computers on my network.. It happened after upgrading to WSUS from SUS and pushing out the client that upgrades Office as well as just Windows.